musings of the methodist world

GC2012 by the numbers — methoblog.com version

Well GC2012 is over and we are still evaluating a General Conference that was a total mess by the end of the week, but the most documented and reported General Conference of all time. Certainly folks have been talking about the influence of Twitter on the conference, and that certainly can’t be denied. Yet, the MethoBlog has had our own influence, both through the little that we did here, but mostly through our partnership with the United Methodist News Service and the GC2012Conversations.com site. Here are a few statistics from the past two weeks:

Methoblog–

6000+ unique visitors in the past two weeks, serving up some 25,000 page views.

GC2012Conversations.com–

79,000+ unique visitors

450,000+ page views

I’ve also been told that the umc.org site served up well over a million page views in the past couple of weeks. That is more page views than they normally serve in a year.

We are in conversations with United Methodist News Service about continuing the partnership beyond the General Conference at some level, as they were very happy at the response.

What we all — you and I — have to determine is whether or not this level of obsession was helpful or harmful to the process of conferencing. The genie is out of the bottle, and I would argue that it would be impossible to ever go back to the way things were before, but how do our structures need to change to reflect the reality of a more actively involved and interested membership?

From a media standpoint, it was a great General Conference. I only wish those charged with carrying out the business of our church could feel as positive about their efforts.